Jill King, Partner, Twelve Consulting Group

We focus a lot of FP&A use cases, and a lot of us were analyst or managers in an FP&A environment, so we understand the struggles that they go through, and we understand the things they want to accomplish.

We also really try to help them get out of maintaining and making things dynamic so they can spend time analyzing their business, as oppose to spending time making sure things are ticking and tying or those non-value added areas.

When we go to a customer who is a heavy Excel® user they are generally very excited to see us because while they like Excel because of its flexibility, they also have a lot of burden on their plate maintaining those models. And when we come and introduce them to Anaplan they do pick it up very quickly.

I think that is really powerful when, you know, it’s one thing to make the process faster but it’s another thing to free up time to allow them to look at their business differently and approach it in a different way.

They’re able to still have control over their own models and have that flexibility to adjust and change them as needed. But at the same time they don’t have to worry about all the things that bogged their time down that don’t add value to the business. They’re not consolidating spreadsheets. They’re not passing them around via email. They’re not trying to figure out which version is the latest version of the model. All they need to worry about is getting the numbers in there, getting the plans in there, and reporting that quickly to their executives.

I would describe Anaplan as a tool that allows Financial Analyst to do their job better — faster, quicker, more precisely. And it also allows them to get key information to decision-makers, timely. A lot of times we go to FP&A projects, and people can’t get the information to the key decision-makers in time. So by the time they’ve done the analysis it’s too late. And so it really empowers the analyst to be more value-added and it allows the decision-makers to make decisions in real time when it matters.